“Nobody drives Pintos anymore.”

Would you also intentionally misread that statement and argue that “Yes, there are indeed still Pintos on the road”?

Give it up. You love the Steve and feel woefully inferior to him.

Yes, you are correct. Nobody drive Pintos anymore — they explode. BluRay uses Java — which doesn’t cause any deaths.

Nobody at Apple uses Java anymore because they have access to OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and have abandoned Java for the bundled Ruby on Rails!

Well BluRay is a pretty small dot on the radar. But what about approximately 1 billion phones that will sell this year that have Java capabilities? Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung, LG, NEC, Sharp have all standardised on J2ME, the mobile Java version to support over the air mobile application download. To not support Java means to alienate thousands of mobile application developers. Heck, even most Windows Mobile devices ship with a J2ME emulator. Not having downloadable app capabilities is the iPhone’s Achilles heal and Jobs knows this. He’s just covering up so people don’t notice this weak spot, but it’s as obvious for anyone with a keen eye as the DRM is flawed in iTunes. All part of the big plan.

When asked about it, Jobs was specifically being asked about Java applets on iPhone, whether they would see Java (or Flash) support in iPhone’s web browser. Naturally, his comment should only be interpreted to how it applies to Safari on the iPhone, not his overall view of the technology.

BluRay is irrelevant. This post is pointless.

I have to agree with Kevin… The comment was relative to Java applets on websites, not Java as a technology. I think Adobe would be annoyed if they were considered “nobody” for using Java for ColdFusion, JRun, Flash Media Server and Flash Data Services.

Kevin,

I understand how he meant it to be interpreted, however, when someone like Jobs makes a blanket statement like this, it can effect peoples perception of a technology. I’m not a fan of BluRay or Java, however, Java is still being used today.

Do you think Java support as in J2ME will be included in the iPhone?

Danny

Hey Danny,

I put up a post about this recently also. I feel the same way you do, in that Jobs made a response which he didn’t qualify (and easily could have), and individuals following that conversation who are not so enlightened as to know the subtleties of a java applet in a browser versus an entire language/framework for an entire device - their assumption might be that Java wouldn’t be on the phone at all, and Java must be dead and is yesterdays news since “Jobs said so”.

I also felt that Markoff and Pogue could have done a better job in their interviews by taking Jobs to task on some of these answers, if at least just to qualify the responses for the readers of their columns/blogs, etc.

Just my two cents. - Rob

What’s Java?

My dog’s name is Java.